In the rush to move the Paris climate change deal into effect, some warn that a bank looking to shell out billions of dollars to help developing countries cope with the effects of global warming may be moving too fast.
The warning is not coming from critics of the Paris deal, the GOP or presidential nominee Donald Trump, but from the climate agreement’s top supporters, including dozens of environmental and civil society groups, ahead of this week’s meeting of the Green Climate Fund in Songdo, South Korea.
The Obama administration’s support for the climate fund has sparked the ire of Republicans on Capitol Hill over the last year, especially after the administration agreed to sign on to the Paris climate agreement in December with 196 other countries. The agreement is nonbinding, but one of the obligations under the deal would mean providing increasing amounts of federal funding to the green bank.
The fund, or bank, seeks to manage contributions from the U.S. and other developed nations to equal at least $100 billion a year by 2020. The funds are slated to be doled out to smaller countries to help them cope with the effects of climate change.
The administration sent $500 million to the climate fund earlier this year, which Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., led the charge to try and stop, to no avail. For the most part, the State Department has ignored the GOP criticism and said it will not reverse its decision.
The issue has quieted in the months leading up to the November elections, except for the occasional statement by Trump that he would exit from the Paris deal if elected president.
The Green Climate Fund will begin a series of important meetings in October to set the policies and procedures of how it procures and distributes the billions of dollars it receives.
The large group of activists, many of whom will be attending the upcoming meetings, have been sending formal comments and letters in the run-up to the Oct. 12-14 meeting in Songdo, detailing a number of problems with what they see as the troubling direction of the fund.
First, some of the initial renewable energy projects it is looking to fund are far too risky to be seriously considered by the Green Climate Fund. How the fund evaluates risk versus reward may be out of step with the emission reduction goals of the Paris accord.
“From the inception of the Green Climate Fund, civil society has been deeply concerned that it would support programs/projects that would cause environmental and social harm to vulnerable communities,” said comments submitted to the fund late last month. “Now, the board of the [climate fund] is expected to consider up to six high-risk programs and projects at its upcoming … board meetings.
“The board should not consider high-risk programs/projects until appropriate policies are in place,” the environmental groups said. “Once that is the case, the board should subject these programs/projects to rigorous scrutiny to ensure that the associated risks are minimized, well-managed and commensurate with the expected benefits.”
The influential group Friends of the Earth played up the concerns in a recent blog post, saying that more than 100 groups signed the comments sent to climate fund officials “to express deep concern about the inadequacy of policies and practices in place for financing activities of high social and/or environmental risk.”
In an email, the group’s Karen Orenstein sent to colleagues before traveling to South Korea, she said hydropower dam projects in particular will be “looming in the background” during the October meeting. The projects are expected to be considered by the board in December.
The groups’ comments said the hydropower projects “are not innovative solutions to climate change, and would rarely (if ever) meet the [climate fund’s] threshold test of effecting a paradigm shift in the context of sustainable development.”
The groups say “large hydropower projects have been notoriously susceptible to enormous cost and time overruns and to causing significant social and environmental harms.” They noted that for years, indigenous peoples, community and civil society groups have been opposing big dam projects due to the projects’ susceptibility to droughts and other global warming effects.
They recommend that smaller projects be considered that pose less of a risk of becoming an economic and environmental burden to countries.
On Oct. 5, the groups sent a joint letter to the fund’s board, detailing a separate, but related, concern with the structure of the climate fund.
The groups point out that the board is examining giving export credit agencies such as the Export-Import Bank similar standing as a country in proposing projects under the green fund. The groups argue that many of the agencies have the resources to invest without the assistance of the climate fund and should not be given standing by the board to ask for financing as a country would. Only countries should have that ability, the groups said in the letter.
“By design, [the agencies] are meant to promote exports and job creation in the home country rather than the recipient country,” the letter to the fund’s board reads.
“Whether from a developed or developing country, their accreditation would thus be inconsistent with — and may be in direct conflict with — the mission and core principles of the [climate fund], including promoting country ownership, local sustainable development benefits, the efficient use of [fund] resources and the fund’s international competitive bidding requirements.”
They recommended that the board reject giving accreditation to the export credit agencies.
In addition to the green fund’s board meeting, this week will be busy amid a flurry of climate change meetings around the globe.
Secretary of State John Kerry and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy will be in Kigali, Rwanda, to negotiate a major deal to phase out refrigerant chemicals under the three-decade-old Montreal Protocol. The chemicals are seen as exacerbating the phenomenon of global warming, and the U.S. is pushing an amendment to the agreement that would phase out the chemicals.
Funding developing countries to help them replace the climate-harming chemicals with alternative substances is expected to be a source of friction according to reports. Some developing countries are concerned that there will be no money to help less-technologically sophisticated countries adopt the ban.
McCarthy told reporters that the administration is aware of the challenges, but is confident a deal can be worked out. Phasing out the chemicals would help lower global temperatures by 0.5 degrees Celsius by next century, according to the EPA. Securing the deal is a key part of President Obama’s broad climate change agenda spelled out under his 2013 Climate Action Plan.
The meetings in Kigali and Songdo come on the heels of the Paris deal being officially ratified last week. The agreement will take effect next month ahead of U.S. elections on Nov. 8.
